Yesterday, I (and several classmates) attended the Open Source Open Mic event in Durham. This consisted of a series of lightning talks about anything that the speaker cared to present. As a general concept, I find this an interesting way for people (in this case programmers, but the format would work for essentially any subject area) to share ideas and see what might be going on in different areas of the field. This event is not specific to any one coding language, so my limited knowledge kept me from understanding a lot of the content. That said, the most fascinating part was the broad range of topics covered. Most of the presenters seemed to be professional programmers in some capacity, but the variety within that definition was impressive.

The first talk was about tracking people’s paths of movement on a large scale. The presenter worked developing transportation apps (or something like that), and he demonstrated one that took data on where taxi rides started and stopped in New York City and mapped it out, showing the popularity of routes and times of day. This one was the most comprehensible to me, as he didn’t go much into the code and instead talked about the conceptual aspect of the mapping program. I can see this sort of project as a more complicated version of the data analysis we’ve just started to learn.

The other topics included CAM software, blog posts, Amazon Echo, Clojure, and Dockercraft (which was strange but entertaining). While I didn’t understand most of the technical details, I very much enjoyed seeing what programmers (professional and otherwise) spend their spare time on. It was also an excellent reminder of the broad scope of this skill and how many fields require it now. I suspect that we get some tunnel vision about our particular areas of study or work, and this event provided some insight into the many other applications.